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The Veins of the Ocean: A Novel
The Veins of the Ocean: A Novel
The Veins of the Ocean: A Novel
Audiobook11 hours

The Veins of the Ocean: A Novel

Written by Patricia Engel

Narrated by Patricia Engel

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

Reina Castillo is the alluring young woman whose beloved brother is serving a death sentence for a crime that shocked the community, throwing a baby off a bridge-a crime for which Reina secretly blames herself. With her brother's death, though devastated and in mourning, Reina is finally released from her prison vigil. Seeking anonymity, she moves to a sleepy town in the Florida Keys where she meets Nesto Cadena, a recently exiled Cuban awaiting with hope the arrival of the children he left behind in Havana. Through Nesto's love of the sea and capacity for faith, Reina comes to understand her own connections to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds her as well as its role in her family's troubled history, and in their companionship, begins to find freedom from the burden of guilt she carries for her brother's crime.
Set in the vibrant coastal and Caribbean communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, with The Veins of the Ocean Patricia Engel delivers a profound and riveting Pan-American story of fractured lives finding solace and redemption in the beauty and power of the natural world, and in one another.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 21, 2016
ISBN9781515976011
Author

Patricia Engel

PATRICIA ENGEL’s debut, Vida, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award and Young Lions Fiction Award; a winner of a Florida Book Award and an Independent Publisher Book Award; and a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Barnes & Noble, and L.A. Weekly. Her award-winning fiction has appeared in A Public Space, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Guernica, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She lives in Miami. WEB: WWW.PATRICIAENGEL.COM

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Rating: 3.976190571428571 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It was difficult to establish a relationship with the characters for a while. But I thought the author was lyrical and am glad I continued reading. I grew to love the two main characters and how two divergent souls came together. It's about all the things important to our lives: love, compassion, understanding, forgiveness. To all this was added the plight of Cuban immigrants to Florida and the anguishing choices they make to leave everything behind for what they hope is a better life for their family, even if that family is left behind at first.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Reina Castillo, whose family emigrated to Miami from Columbia, is a newborn when her father finds out his wife has been unfaithful and throws their 3-year son Carlito off the Rickenbacker Bridge at Biscayne Bay. The son is rescued; the father kills himself in prison. Years later, a teen-aged Reina, fearing her brother will leave her for his girlfriend, tells him (untruthfully) that the girlfriend is cheating on him, and Carlito takes the girlfriend's small daughter and throws her off the same bridge. The child dies, and Carlito goes to death row. The story opens during the seven years of his death row stay, with Reina, wracked with guilt, spending all her money and free time visiting him and taking his phone calls. After his death, she moves alone to the Keys and tries to find a way to survive her grief and regret. She meets a Cuban refugee, a lovely, gentle man who works tirelessly to bring his children out of Cuba. Together these two slowly fall into a relationship which supports them both while they work out how to go on with their lives.This is a gentle tale, full of details of immigrant life, Cuban culture, and the hopes and memories of the displaced. Spanish phrases intermingle with Cuban spiritualism, with the details of dolphin "refuges", free-diving, and life in this very southern part of Florida, where starving refugees in half-wrecked boats turn up near shore regularly in an attempt to reach land and escape their desperate lives. Lyrical, poetic, moving. A real find.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Interesting story. I probably wouldn’t have read it, but it was for a book club. Unfortunately, I don’t think most authors make the best readers. I prefer actors who have great intonation and can really do the voices of the different characters. Patricia Engel’s reading style was a little flat and repetitious.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book has left a hole in my heart.

    So good.

    It is so sad. The language is so lovely. The sense of place blows my mind. The spirituality is a living, breathing thing (it is so beautiful to read about Santeria in an everyday context and not just associated with fantasy).

    I'm not sure I've ever loved an audiobook this much before. I can feel a book hangover coming on.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Different paths in life, but same internal struggles draw Reina and Nesto together. Their tale isn’t a love story and I wouldn’t call this a romance novel. Rather, more of a tale of two survivors learning to carve their own way in life.
    I found myself immersed in the story with them and hoping for their redemption from themselves.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A moving, slow and meditative novel about love, loss and moving on, set in south Florida and Cuba. It echoes with memory, magic and passion and deals with difficult issues and tragedy but there is hope as well among the waves and the breezes of the Florida Keys.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Immigrants are highly visible in the news right now, both legal and illegal. We talk about the effect of immigration on jobs, taxes, health care and education costs, infrastructure, and more. But the emotional cost of leaving your home for another country, perhaps forever, is rarely examined in depth. Patricia Engel's novel, The Veins of the Ocean, addresses life as an immigrant, the bonds of family, and a loyalty that stretches beyond country and beyond death.Reina Castillo came to the US from Colombia as a baby. After discovering his wife's infidelity, her father, Hector, threw her older brother off a bridge in Miami. Young Carlito was saved by a fisherman who jumped in after the child. Although it didn't happen to her, this is the central fact of Reina's life, indeed of her whole family's life. When Carlito, in his turn, throws his girlfriend's daughter off a bridge, the child is not saved. Hector committed suicide while in prison for his actions. Carlito spent years on death row for his, with Reina visiting him dutifully for that entire stretch of time until he too died in prison. Cut loose from her vigil and mourning the loss of her beloved older brother, a man no one else would grieve because of his terrible crime, Reina moves to the Florida Keys where she tries to move on with her life, meeting Nestor, a Cuban refugee with his own sad history.Reina and Nestor are both leery of relationships with others, both having lost so much. Both are still deeply tied to their countries of origin and the people and places they've left behind, there and here. Their slow, almost offhand, developing connection to each other is tenuous. They are afraid to fully commit because of the cost of their already existing family bonds and each of them needs to figure out how they can break free of the real and created prisons of their lives. They contend with guilt and despair, grief, love, and loyalty, loneliness and poverty. The freedom of the open ocean and the contrasting captive dolphins at the center where both Nestor and Reina work are powerful allegories for the place in which they each find themselves and for which they are each searching. About a third of the novel focuses on Reina, her childhood, her past, and her connection with her brother. The rest of the novel focuses on her life after Carlito's death and her fragile relationship with a damaged Nestor. The narration is slow and contemplative, almost dreamy and drifting in places. The characters are scarred and lost. The story aches with hurt, sorrow, and a feeling of displacement. It's dark and complicated and sometimes frustrating, much in the way that life can be. Readers who are drawn to family dysfunction or to immigrant stories or to character driven narratives will find much to think about in these pages.